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French Revolution
The era of the French Revolution lasted from about 1789 AD until 1799 AD. It began with a financial crisis that forced Louis XVI to summon the French parliament for the first time in over two hundred-years. It then ended with the Coup of 18 Brumaire that swept Napoleon Bonaparte to power, who would carry forward much of what the Revolution had achieved. Following in the footsteps of the American Revolution, the French Revolution was one of the most dramatic social upheavals in history. The Revolution itself was a mess, a great confused boiling-over of French society. It can best be understood as a clash between conservative royalists, moderate revolutionaries, and radical revolutionaries; although the radicals are especially hard to define for it encompassed everything from liberals to proto-communists to anarchists. It was conservative royalists who first turned the French financial crisis into a political crisis, but they soon came to realise that they had more to fear from an increasingly democratic France, than an increasingly despotic king. In the first truly revolutionary act, the moderate revolutionaries seized control of the government, abolished feudal privileges and the dominant position of the Church, and established a constitutional monarchy. Although the constitution was progressive for its time, the radical revolutionaries then seized the state and overthrew the monarchy, establishing a republic. They had sweeping plans for wealth redistribution and universal suffrage that were well ahead of their time; Switzerland became the first state to actually introduce universal male suffrage more than half-a-century later. However, these were never implemented in the face of the French Revolutionary War and conservative royalists counter-revolutionaries. Instead, emergency powers were used to conduct a repressive Terror. As the war turned in the favour of the French, the actions of the radical revolutionaries became unjustifiable and another coup of moderate revolutionaries swept them to power. However, the moderates were unable to establish stability while fending off resurgent conservative royalists and radicals, and their government became synonymous with corruption and self-interest. Ultimately, this led the French people into the safe and comforting arms of one man; Napoleon Bonaparte; essentially exchanging the authoritarian regime of an absolute monarchy, for another authoritarian regime. Regardless of the Terror and the “despotism” of Napoleon, the French Revolution was arguably far more revolutionary than its American counterpart. Its ideas especially the principle of equality profoundly altered the course of modern history, and triggered the decline of absolute monarchies, and the rise of liberal democracies, as well as socialism, secularism, radicalism. The revolution would immediately inspire revolutions in Haiti and Ireland, and all the way down to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars witnessed the birth of Total War. History Build-up to the French Revolution With the European Age of Enlightenment heavily influencing the American War of Independence, it was hardly surprising that the hopes raised by the birth of the young United States of America would spread to Europe too. Nowhere was this felt more dramatically than in the great confused boiling-over of French society; the French Revolution (1789-1799). Although the feudal system had been weakened in France by the firm establishment of absolute monarchy under Louis XIV, the 27 million people who made up French society were still rigidly divided into the famous three Estates of the so-called Ancien Régime: the First Estate being the clergy, the Second Estate being the nobility, and the Third Estate, everyone else. French society was fundamentally maladjusted. The Third Estate made up 98% of the population, with the vast majority either: landless peasants or urban unskilled workers relying on the uncertainty of day-labour; small subsistence farmers living under the last burdensome vestiges of feudalism, and in constant fear of their precious land being taken if they ever fell behind on a loan; artisans still suffering under to the restrictive practices of the Medieval Guild system; and traders constrained by France's archaic internal tariffs between provinces. Nevertheless, the Bourgeoisie, the prosperous upper echelon of the Third Estate, were the fasting growing demographic groups in 18th century France: large independent farmers; middle-class professionals like lawyers and doctors; and the secure urban elite such as merchants, industrialists, and bankers. However, for the wealthiest bourgeoisie, money was often not reinvested back into the trades that had enriched them. Instead, they sought to purchase their way into the Second Estate, through the venal offices introduced by Louis XIV. All nobles enjoyed tax exceptions of various types and sizes, in France's rather upside-down principle that the wealthier you were, the less tax you paid; another means by which absolute monarchy controlled the nobility. There were somewhere in the region of 260,000 nobles in France, including the old Sword Nobility and the new bourgeois Robe Nobility. Meanwhile, there were about 130,000 clergy in the First Estate. Collectively the Church owned about 10% of all the land in France, and enjoyed its own tax exceptions. First Estate was in many ways a microcosm of the other two Estates, with the bishoprics dominated by the nobility, increasingly estranged from the parish priests recruited from the commoners. It not that the nobility and the Church paid no tax, its just that they weren't paying anything even close to their fair share. Inevitably, the burden of taxation fell disproportionately on the Third Estate, and especially the bourgeoisie, adding to their resentment at being entirely excluded from the political process. The blame for the mature form of the Ancien Régime, and persistent financial problems of the French monarchy, are most often laid at the feet of Louis XIV. Yet at the end of the Sun King's reign, France's problems were far from insurmountable for an effective monarch. Unfortunately, Louis XV (1715-774) was neither very interested in politics, nor particularly capable. He involved France in the Seven Years' War at great expense and with disastrous results: while France committed her resources to a continental stalemate, the crucial colonial struggle with Britain was decisively lost. Louis XV' reign was characterised by political and economic malaise, but also by the full flowering of the French Enlightenment and a fantastic explosion of philosophy, literature, and science. In part this was facilitated by Louis' lax views on censorship. Virtually every social, economical, and political aspect of the Ancien Régime was judged and found wanting by these Enlightenment philosophers, who were read more widely in France than anywhere else, through the many “''societies of thought''”: coffeehouses, chess clubs, masonic lodges, and agricultural societies. Thus the problems of France's maladjusted society and financial mess landed at the feet of Louis XVI (1774-91), the grandson of Louis XV. He was amiable, well-meaning, and not at all opposed to much needed reform. But he was also indecisive and ill-prepared for the looming crisis. While Charles I of England had lost his head due to his own infuriating inflexibility, Louis XV went to the guillotine for his tendency to back-down when faced with strong opposition, resulting in destabalising swings in policy that helped escalated the Revolution every step of the way. As part of his grandfathers alliance, Louis had married the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette. However, in the wake of the Seven Years' War, Austria was widely blamed for dragging France into a war over Silesia that wound-up gaining Austria nothing while costing France both her colonies and international prestige. Thus the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was particularly reviled as frivolous and corrupt. This impression was only reinforced in 1785, when news broke of a court scandal involving the theft of a valuable diamond necklace. A poverty-stricken noblewoman had used the queens name in a clever deception to steal the necklace. When exposed and found guilty of the crime, the con-woman was publicly flogged. Yet the noblewoman garnered a great deal of sympathy from the public and many continued to believe that the queen had been involved. Marie Antoinette, though entirely blameless, became a figure of hatred, and by extension so did the monarchy. Meanwhile, France was the most populous country in Europe, with the European population having doubled between between 1715 and 1800 due to higher standards of living and reduced the mortality rates. Crop failures in much of the country in 1775 and even worse in 1787-88 would compound the existing restlessness in the country. France was in desperate need of long overdue modernising reform, but the weakness of absolute monarchy is that it depended entirely on the talents of the despot in whose hands all authority was gathered. Meanwhile France was not quite an absolute monarchy, and still subject to entrenched interests. The direct cause of the French Revolution was ultimately a financial crisis. France was on the brink of bankruptcy due to her costly involvements in the Seven Years’ War. These financial problems were well known to the royal ministry long before the Revolution. Two reforming finance ministers, Maupeou (1770-74) and Turgot (1774-76), were dismissed when their efforts to spread the burden of taxation more fairly foundered against well-orchestrated resistance by the nobility. Turgot had been bitterly opposed to French involvement in the American War of Independence, which would only exacerbate the country's barely manageable debt. Ironically, France didn't even benefit from the birth of the independent United States of America, with Britain quickly restoring the old colonial relationship in economic terms. Meanwhile in contrast to these reformer, there was the finance ministry of Jacques Necker (1777-81) who could charitably be called a charlatan. He falsified the royal finances in order to get favourable rates on bank loans, which further hampered his successors from enacting reforms because the full extent of the financial crisis was not believed until it was too late. In 1787, finance minister Charles Alexandre de Calonne finally accepted that the financial crisis everybody had been trying to avoid for the last decades was upon them; debt interest repayments were now a full quarter of France's annual revenue. In February, he called the Assembly of Notables, an assembly of the nobility, for the first time since 1626, hoping to avert bankruptcy through a package of reforms that include a land tax from which there would be no exemptions and a Stamp Tax. While the privileged classes agreed in general with the need for reform, they resisted them in every practical detail, for a variety of reasons from self-interest to the sense that France's finances needed greater oversight. After a protracted back and forth, the now heavily watered-down financial reforms were sent to the provincial assemblies for ratification. The debates in the provincial assemblies brought the fight into the public domain for the first time, and the nobility used the public attention in order to block the king's will, which quickly got out of hand with the first street protests that would become so common. The country was especially volatile at the time, because of economic deprivation brought on by the bad harvest in 1787, that would be even worse in 1788, adding to the existing grievances of the Third Estate. In the midst of this turmoil, an international crisis in September 1787 laid bare for all of Europe to see, just how weak the once mighty French had become. In recent years, the Dutch Republic had been embroiled in a factional dispute between those who advocated retaining her alliance with Britain, and those who favoured France; the Dutch had for instance allied with the colonists against the British in the American War of Independence. In September, Britain's ally Prussia briefly invaded and ousted the French faction from power. Despite French national interest, the ministry concluded that they could not afford a military response, and did not lift a finger. With even watered-down financial reforms being blocked by the provincial assemblies, France's international reputation in tatters, and no bank willing to lend the country any more money, the royal ministers were forced to admit defeat. Unwittingly and unwisely as it would turn out, the nobility had provoked a political crisis by insisting that taxation was only valid if agreed by the full French parliament (Estates General). It was in this complex interplay of political impotence and reforming aspiration that Louis XVI called the Estates General to meet at Versailles in May 1789, for the first time in 175 years. The nobility would soon come to realise that they had more to fear from an increasingly democratic France, than an increasingly despotic king. French Revolution: Moderate Stage The Estates General dated back to the 13th century when Philip II and Louis IX were consolidating royal authority over France, and was the closest thing France ever had to a national parliament, bringing together representatives of all three Estates; it had not sat since 1614, during the minority of Louis XIII. In its traditional composition each of the three Estates had an equal number of deputies, and each groups met and voted separately; thus allowing the two privileged Estates (clergy and nobility) to together out-vote the Third Estate (everyone else) on every issue. Having been forced to call the Estates General through well-orchastrated opposition, Louis XVI encouraged debate on how the assembly should be composed, hoping to divide the nobility from the commoners, and that is exactly what happened. When the nobility tried to cling to their traditional over-representation in the assembly, it utterly destroyed their political credibility, and brought the newly awakened Third Estate into political prominence. After much rancorous debate and unrest, the king eventually sided with the commoners, that the Third Estate should have double the representation, as was common in some provincial assemblies. On 4 May 1789, some 1,200 elected deputies convened at Versailles for the Estate General; 600 representing the Third Estate, and 300 for each of the other two. The assembly had a number of notable characteristics: owing to the relatively open vote, the First Estate was predominantly represented by ordinary parish priests, rather than noble bishops; election for the Second Estate was restricted to the old Sword Nobility, thus was decidedly conservative; and due to the obligations of standing for election, a vast majority of those representing the Third Estate were wealthy bourgeoisie, especially lawyers. Events in the Estates General began to get out of hand almost immediately, over the issue of whether the three Estates should meet and vote separately as in the past, or as a joint assembly; the king made it clear that he favoured a joint assembly but refused to order it. The talks became deadlocked: the conservative controlled Second Estate would accept nothing less than to vote separately; the First Estate agreed with the nobility, albeit narrowly, with many of the parish priest naturally swayed by the few bishops; and the Third Estate refused to transact any business whatsoever unless they met as a joint assembly, with some delegate having been spoiling for this fight for a year. As the impasse dragged on, the Third Estate almost inevitably became more radical. On 10 June, they defiantly began transacting business as if they were the only legitimate assembly, while inviting the clergy and nobility to join them. Over the next few days, 19 clergymen indeed crossed the divide and joined them. In an attempt to regain control of the proceedings, on 20 June, Louis XVI announced that he was summoning a meeting of all three Estates in his presence, and closed the large hall where the Third Estate had been meeting to prepare for the event. What happened next is a matter for historical debate: was this a sinister attempt to stop the Third Estate from convening alone, or was it a misunderstanding. The Third Estate arrived at Versailles to find their meeting hall locked and blocked by armed guards, with no clear explanation. Indignant, they simply moved their deliberations to the nearest unlocked hall, an indoor tennis court. There they took part in the first great dramatic set-piece of the French Revolution; the Tennis Court Oath '''(20 June 1789). The delegates swore an oath to maintain their assembly until a new French constitution had been established. When the royal session finally did occur, the king decidedly failed to calm the waters. Soon a majority of the representatives of the clergy voted to join the Third Estate, as did 47 members of the nobility. On 27 June, Louis XVI caved-in, and orders all the clergy and the nobility to join in forming an official French parliament (the National Constituent Assembly) to draft a constitution for France. While this intense political drama was acting out a few miles away at Versailles, Paris was in the throes of economic deprivation brought on by the bad harvest of 1787 and '88. The results were food shortages, soaring bread prices, and an unruly city. With this volatile situation in Paris, the king began building up troops around the capital. Many Parisians presumed Louis' actions to be aimed against the parliament, and on 12 July 1789 Paris went into open rebellion. This was encouraged in the early stages by local radical politicians, but soon got entirely out of hand, and the capital was consumed by riots, chaos, and widespread looting, especially of weapons. On 14 July, the insurgents set their eyes on the ammunition cache inside the great fortress of the '''Bastille, a potent symbol of royal tyranny; formerly a state prison for those who had angered the king, though now largely fallen into disuse. The Bastille was stormed and several of the garrison died grisly deaths in the neighbouring streets; just seven prisoners were “liberated”, none of whom had been victims of any royal injustice. The drab reality of the event, however, couldn’t tarnish the Bastille as a symbol of overthrow of the Ancien Régime itself. Order was eventually restored in Paris with the help of a volunteer militia who wore the tricolour cockade, which later becomes the basis of the French national flag. The wave of revolutionary fervour and widespread hysteria spread from Paris throughout rural France that summer; dubbed the Great Fear. Revolting against years of exploitation, peasants looted and burned the homes of landlords and tax collectors. Given urgency by news of violence in many parts of France, the parliament abolished all traces of feudal apparatus of the Ancien Régime, issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, nationalised all Church property, and ordered the clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. The drafting a formal constitution proved much more of a challenge with a rift slowly grew between the radical and moderate assembly members. With rumours of counter-revolutionary court intrigues and bread shortages in Paris, on 5 October some 7,000 market women from Paris marched on Versailles to put their views in forcible fashion to the king himself; the Women’s March. The crowd was only calmed when the king promised to accompany them to Paris. The royal family would live in the Tuileries Palace under the "protection" of the volunteer militia (the National Guard); they were physically prevented from leaving. The parliament also followed the court. With the move to Paris, in radical and tumultuous mood, the Revolution would begin enter a new phase. For the next eight months, Louis XVI seemed to be genuinely accepting of the Revolution and reconciled to being a citizen king. Yet Paris was a passionate and often dangerous place, fermented by uncensored newspapers and fervent debate in political clubs. The most significant of these clubs were the Jacobin and the Cordeliers, owing to the leading role their members would play in the later Revolution; Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, and Maximilien Robespierre. Numerous aristocrats had already fled abroad, and on the night of 20 June 1791, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their two children decided to join them; the Royal Flight to Varennes. They succeeded in leaving the Tuileries Palace in disguise and fled Paris for the border with Germany. However, the next day the king was recognized and arrested at Varennes, and dragged ignobly back to Paris. The royal flight lit the tinder on a simmering tension within the Revolutionaries: the respectable moderates who currently held sway in the parliament and mostly feared lower class led anarchy, and the populist radicals of the political clubs who felt the Revolution hadn’t gone far enough and feared an aristocratic led counter-revolution. On July 17, George Danton organised a mass demonstration on the Champ de Mars in support of a petition to parliament demanding the abdication of Louis XVI. The demonstration quickly got out of hands, stones were thrown, and the National Guard opened fire on the crowd. Some demonstrators were killed, and others were trampled in the resulting panic; about fifty deaths in all. The schism between the moderate and radical Revolutionaries was irrevocably complete. The National Guard were controlled, not by the king, but by the parliament. This would be a theme throughout later revolutions; what once looked like radical hope and change to authoritarian government, suddenly became the authoritarian government as increasingly radical ideas were embraced. Meanwhile, Louis XVI had little option but to sign-up to the new constitution which left the king as something of a figurehead but still retaining some significant powers like a suspensive veto. The constitution provided for a newly elected parliament (the Legislative Assembly), but crucially the old parliament also agreed to a self-denying proviso; members of the old parliament could not sit in the first new parliament. This was intended to signal that the parliament had no intention of permanently seizing power, but it would ultimately weaken the position of the moderate revolutionaries. The new parliament of entirely of new members that met for the first time on 1 October 1791 was far more clearly divided between the moderates linked to the bourgeoisie who became known as the Girondins, and the radicals linked to the poorer classes and the political clubs who were known as the Jacobins. The political spectrum commonly used today of the “left–wing, right-wing”, derives from where the Girondins and Jacobins sat in this first French parliament. The first major issue to face the new parliament was whether France should go to war. Since the flight of Louis XVI to Varennes, the danger to the royal family was now painfully evident. On 12 April 1792, Austria and Prussia re-issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, declaring a willingness to use force if necessary to protect Louis XVI; Marie Antoinette was the sister of the Austrian emperor Leopold II, but there were also fears that France’s revolutionary spirit would spread as well as encouragement from French aristocratic émigrés. Louis XVI and the Girondins managed to push through a French declaration of war, each for their own reasons: the king hoped a successful war would increase his own popularity, while foreseeing an opportunity to exploit any defeat; while the Girondins wanted to legitimise the new government though a successful war. However, the first campaign of the French Revolutionary War (1792-1802), the French invasion of Austrian Belgium was a debacle; soldiers deserted en-masse and, in one case, murdered their own general. The revolution had wreaked havoc on the French army; most of the office class had been aristocrats, half of whom had already fled the country. French Revolution: Radical Stage With the war off to a bad start, the fear inside Paris magnified into the willingness of everyone to see enemies everywhere. On the night of 10 August 1792, a radical mob led by Georges Danton assailed the Tuileries Palace, killing the Swiss Guards in a bloody frenzy, and taking the royal family prisoners. In the aftermath, with most of the moderate Girondin members of parliament gone into hiding, the rump of the parliament dissolved itself and called for fresh elections under universal male-suffrage; removing the tax-paying qualification for voters and the property-owning threshold for candidates. The elections took place amid a wave of mob violence in Paris, and when the new parliament (National Convention) met for the first time on 20 September 1792 its membership read like a who’s who of radical Revolutionary politics; Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, and Maximilien Robespierre. Nevertheless there were still a large number of moderate Girondin. On the same day as the first sitting of the new parliament, the French revolutionary army won its first decisive victory of the war, halting the combined forces of Austria and Prussia at the Battle of Valmy (September 1792); volunteers had been pouring into the army prompted by the nationalism awakened by the Revolution. In confident mood, the parliament voted for the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. After weeks of rancorous debate, the quasi-legal trial before parliament of King Louis XVI narrowly condemned him to death. Louis XVI was executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793. The kings death provoked Britain, Holland, and Spain to join Austria and Prussia in the French Revolutionary War. With the stage cleared by the death of the king, parliament lapsed into an extreme example of political in-fighting; in this case literally lethal. The first contest was between the two clear-cut rivals, the Girondins and the Jacobins. On 2 June 1793, a mob surrounded the parliament and prevented the members from leaving until they agreed to arrest of twenty-nine leading Girondins. However, the debate as to how to deal with the now imprisoned Girondins exposed the next fatal rift within the parliament. George Danton and his allies saw the revolution as now secure with no further need for victimisation, while ultra-radical Maximilien Robespierre and his supporters were determined to secure their own radical version of the revolution by eliminating all opposition. The case for the ultra-radicals was strengthened on 13 July 1793 when Charlotte Corday, avenging the arrest of the Girondins, assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, the most poisonous voice of the ultra-radical-left; an insufferable colleague became a useful martyr. His death made it easy to justify harsh measures against the Girondins; more than thirty were guillotined in October 1793. By this time, Robespierre was firmly in control of the executive branch of government (the Committee of Public Safety), which gradually acquired the ruthlessly unaccountable powers of a police state. It used them with the arbitrary cruelty which has become known as The Terror. It was kicked off with the show-trial and execution by guillotine of Marie Antoinette on 16 October 1793. During the next ten-months, some 16,594 more “enemies of the state” went to the guillotine. Sometimes people died for their political opinions or actions, but many for little beyond mere suspicion. Most of the victims, some 70%, were from the regions outside Paris that had already gone in open revolt for various reasons: some were supportive of the clergy who had largely refused the oath of loyalty to the state; some were strongholds of the Girondins; some resented military conscription; and others were fermented by royalists. During the peak of the Terror, George Danton, one of the revolution’s most powerful orators, continued to argue against its severity. His argument was inevitably a criticism of Robespierre. At the end of March 1794, the executive took the risk of ordering the arrest of Danton and his faction, and thanks to some fabricated evidence they too went to the guillotine. These Dantonistes were the same men who had taken down the Bastille, overthrown the monarchy, sentenced the king to death, and defended the revolution since the very beginning; it was time to the revolution to eat its own children. French Revolution: The Directory Robespierre’s power was now absolute, or so it seemed. Fearing that the Terror would soon be turned on them, on 27 July 1794 a majority in the parliament suddenly turned against him. Parliament ordered Robespierre arrested, together with Saint-Just and other close allies; the Thermidorian Reaction. As many as one-hundred-and-five members of the Robespierre faction were promptly carried to the guillotine. With their departure, the blood lust of the Terror at last died, though in the coming months Jacobins were massacred in many parts of the country in revenge for the events of Terror. Politically the events of Thermidor resulted in power returning more fully to parliament. The main concern for the moderates who now dominated parliament was to safeguard the perceived benefits of the Revolution, and at the same time avoid a lurch to either extreme. The new constitution approved on 22 August 1795 established an executive of five directors chosen annually by parliament; the Directory. This, together with the replacement of universal male-suffrage with the old restrictions on electors and candidates, was a clear step back from full democracy and causes much agitation in political circles in Paris. The Directory was dominated by the more moderate voices in parliament like Paul Barras, but the dilemma they faced was a daunting: food shortage remained severe; inflation was crippling; and the British naval blockade of France was devastating the economy. Meanwhile, the mood of unrest gave encouragement to the royalists who fermented the armed coup of 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795) against parliament; the last popular uprising of the Revolution. It would bring to the fore a young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon was born in Corsica in 1769, making him a native French citizen by just fifteen months; the often rebellious island had been sold by Genoa to France in 1768. The young Corsican was educated in the military academy at Brienne-le-Château, where he was treated as an outsider, fuelling his interest in radical politics. He had made his name at the Siege of Toulon (1793), which had been handed over to the British navy by counter-revolutionaries. Napoléon was promoted to the command of the artillery when his commander was wounded, and his artillery tactics and his leadership played a crucial role in the successful assault of the city. By 1795, with unrest in Paris, Napoléon was appointed to defend the parliament in the Tuileries. He quickly appreciated that in the straight streets around the Tuileries, the issue may be decided by a few cannon rather than thousands of muskets, and order forty guns brought from a camp six miles from Paris. During the afternoon of 5 October columns of armed men marched on the Tuileries. They had barely exchanged musket fire with the parliament’s troops when the first volleys of grapeshot from Napoleon’s cannon tore into their ranks. After two or three further attempts, the rebels scattered; according to his propaganda, Napoléon had cleared the streets with a “whiff of grapeshot” although in reality it was a far closer run thing. This event turned out to be an important milestone in Napoléon’s career, for he was rewarded with an appointment as commander-in-chief of the French army in the Italian Alps. The four remaining years of the Directory, with occasional changes of personnel, saw the moderates fending off both the resurgent radical Jacobins demanding a more radical democracy, and continuing royalist scheming for a restoration of the monarchy. Continuing food shortages and inflation at first favoured the Jacobin cause. However, the direct call for a coup against the parliament from the political extremist François-Noël Babeuf, provided the Directory with the pretext to arrest and guillotine him, as well as to close many of the radical political clubs and publications; Babeuf’s call for the abolition of private property have led many later scholars to describe him as a proto-communist. However, public alarm at the reappearance of radicalism caused the pendulum to swing the other way. In the elections of 1797, the royalists gained a strong foothold in parliament, and even secured a place among the five Directors for one of their number. To counter the royalists, the Directory turned to the abuse of its powers. When a senior royalist member of parliament was exposed as having treasonous correspondence with the brother of Louis XVI, the Directory staged a coup on 4 September 1797; the Coup of 18 Fructidor. Many of the royalists were arrested, and the entire election result annulled. The rampant vote manipulation by the Directory in the election of 1798 would ultimately destroy all of the government’s credibility, and it became synonymous with corruption and self-interest. In the aftermath, inflammatory radical clubs reappear and it seemed as if the swing of the pendulum from extreme to extreme must be an unending process, unless stopped by another and more drastic coup d’état; the Coup of 18 Brumaire. French Revolutionary War The first major development of the French Revolutionary War (1792-1802) was an invasion of northeast France by a joint Austrian and Prussian army in August 1792. The invasion was eventually turned back by a republican army at the Battle of Valmy (September 1792). This unexpected success was soon followed by others. A victory at the Battle of Jemappes (November) enabled the French to overrun much of the Austrian Belgium. Meanwhile another republican army was making great strides east of the Rhine; Worms, Mainz and briefly Frankfurt were captured in the autumn of 1792. By the end of March 1793, the territories occupied by French troops included Belgium, the Rhineland, and Savoy and Nice. These astonishingly rapid successes owed much to the desire for reform by many people in the annexed regions, and to the nature of the new French armies. From the outbreak of the war numerous and passionate volunteers had signed-up for the army. Then from August 1793, France became the first country to attempt national conscription, drafting bachelors and childless widowers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. This development had become a necessity because after the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 virtually the whole of Europe had followed Austria’s lead in waging war against republican France; Austria, Prussia, Britain, Holland, Portugal, Spain, and parts of Italy. However, the new policy of conscription enabled France to keep large armies in the field, facing in every hostile direction; the armies of the North, of the Ardennes, of the Moselle, of the Alps, of Italy and of the Pyrenees. Meanwhile, the failure of the allies to cooperate effectively meant that the issue was evenly matched. After two years of inconclusive campaigns around France’s borders, it was the French who would start to make ground again; annexing the Netherlands in 1795 and persuading the Spanish to switch sides in 1796. Meanwhile, Prussia gradually lapsed into neutrality. Thus by the year 1796, the only enemies still at war with France were Austria, Britain, Portugal, and parts of Italy. The British navy was able to prevent any French initiative at sea, but otherwise the British were as usual mostly interested in colonial acquisitions; Spanish Minorca in the Mediterranean was seized by the British, as well as Spanish Trinidad, Dutch Sri Lanka, and Dutch Cape Town. The French strategy for 1796 was for the French army to go onto the offensive against Austria to the north of the Alps, while a secondary front in northern Italy would tie-up her resources and support. However, the main thrust of the attack to north of the Alps made little lasting headway against the Austrians. By contrast in Italy the results under twenty-six--year-old Napoleon Bonaparte were astonishing. Napoleon joined his army in March 1796 after being appointed commander-in-chief of the French army in the Italian Alps after armed coup of 13 Vendémiaire. He found himself in command of 37,000 demoralized men, badly fed and unpaid. However during early-April, he led his soldiers in a series of rapid minor victories that raise their spirits and held-out the promise of rich loot under this energetic young commander; Napoleon’s First Italian Campaign (1792–97). Then instead of taking the obvious route along the coast, Napoleon led his army through Alpine passes to catch the Austrians unaware at the Battle of Montenotte (April). This left the French in between a Sardinian army to the west, and the remaining Austrians to the east. The victory at the Battle of Lodi (May) would be the first great example of Napoleon’s strategy of the central position which he would use over and over again in his career; when confronted by two armies, plunge between them, prevent them from linking up, overwhelm one, and then turn around and overwhelm the other. Five days after Lodi, he entered Milan. The central focus for the rest of the year was the Austrian fortress of Mantua. By the time it fell in February 1797, all of northern Italy had been essentially annexed by France. A steady stream of booty, both of bullion and art, would make its way from Italy back to Paris, swelling the depleted French treasury; the loot included the famous bronze horses from St Mark’s in Venice, originally looted from Constantinople. By April 1797, Napoleon was secure enough to move northwards against Vienna itself. He was just two days’ march from the city when the Austrian emperor agreed an armistice; the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797) officially ceded Austrian Belgium and northern Italy to France. With peace restored to Continental Europe, now the only nation still at war with France was her traditional enemy, Britain. Napoleon was appointed commander of an army for a proposed invasion across the Channel. However, his tour of the coast from Normandy to Belgium in February 1798 convinced him that an attack on Britain was unwise until France had command of the seas. Instead he proposed a much more exotic course of action; Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign (1798–1801). He argued that seizure of Ottoman Egypt by France would harm British communications with India. In March 1798 the Directors approved his plan; perhaps welcoming the chance to send this popular and ambitious general far from the centre of power. On May 19, seventeen warships and other vessels sailed from Toulon and four other ports on their journey east. In addition to some thirty-eight-thousand troops were one-hundred-and-fifty of France’s most distinguished men of science to report on this ancient oriental civilization. The voyage was dangerous because the British were aware that something other than a British invasion was being planned, had sent a strong naval squadron under Horatio Nelson into the Mediterranean. However, Napoleon was lucky and reached Egypt unobserved at the end of June. Alexandria was taken, and the army marched south through heat and drought towards Cairo. At the Battle of the Pyramids (21 July), the French formed up in solid six-deep divisional squares, and their fire-power devastated the wild charges of the Egyptian Mameluke cavalry. Victory delivered Cairo and all Egypt to Napoleon. His team of scientists could now begin to studies; in the following year, a French officer found the Rosetta Stone. However, eight days after Napoleon entered Cairo, Nelson finally came across the French fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay, and destroyed it at the Battle of the Nile (1 August). Napoleon, master of Egypt, was now stranded in his new colony, and moreover had provoked a new enemy; Ottoman Turkey. By February 1799, a Turkish army was preparing to march south through Syria and Palestine, but Napoleon moved first. Although Napoleon’s Syrian campaign succeeded in stalling the Ottoman overland invasion, it provides another dire example of European brutality in Palestine in the bleak tradition of the Crusades. Frustrated after the delays in taking El Arish and Gaza, at Jaffa the three-thousand Ottoman defenders were all executed with bayonetted to conserve ammunition. This event was rapidly followed by plague in the French army, and by the famous moment of flamboyant courage when Napoleon visited the sick in the hospital at Jaffa. By early June, the bedraggled French army were back in Cairo. The Ottoman forces were instead transported to Egypt by a British fleet, only to suffer a crushing defeat at the Battle of Aboukir (25 July). However, by now news had arrived from France that the political situation in Paris was increasingly unstable, with The Directory distrusted and discredited. On 24 August 1799, Napoleon set sail for France in secret, abandoning the remnants of his army. The French army would finally be expelled from Egypt in 1801 by a combined Turkish and British forces. Napoléon’s Coup of 18 Brumaire By 1799, two of the great survivors of the years of revolutionary turmoil, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and Charles-Maurice Tallyrand, had concluded that France’s political chaos required military intervention. Within weeks of Napoleon’s return to the Paris on 16 October, they were actively engaged in planning a coup; the Coup of 18 Brumaire. A false rumour of an imminent Jacobin plot against the Directory was the first step; Napoleon was given command of all available local troops. On 9 November 1799, those Directors who were not in the plot were arrested, and the parliament was surrounded by Napoleon’s troops. A quorum of terrified members of parliament were then rounded up, and persuaded to formally end the Directory and swear loyalty to a new provisional executive of three men; Sieyès, Roger Ducos, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Over the next month, Sieyès and Ducos were browbeaten by supposedly junior partner Napoleon into drafting a new French constitution. The constitution accepted in December provided an executive first consul, supported by advisory second and third consuls, and “checked” by no less than four assemblies of differing functions; a calculated recipe for political inertia except at the very top where the first consul would have virtually unlimited powers. It was no surprise that the first consul was to be Napoleon, with a Jacobin and a Royalist as second and third consuls to appease both factions. When the constitution was put to a national referendum in February 1800 it passed by 3,011,007 votes to only 1562. After ten years of upheaval and terror, the French were ready to accept dictatorial rule by a man from neither faction who was decisive, professionally equipped to direct France’s wars, and sympathetic to the principles of the Revolution. Napoleon Bonaparte and the times were well suited to each other. Haitian Revolution Just as the French were transforming their society, so were the Haitians in the only successful slave rebellions in modern history. By the late 18th century, Haiti was France’s wealthiest overseas colony, based largely on sugar and coffee plantations. It was also home to more slaves than any other place except for Brazil; 90% of the population. Colonial society in French Haiti was divided into four distinct groups: the Big Whites or plantation owners; then the Little Whites or poorer whites; below them were the wealthy free people-of-colour; and at the bottom the overwhelming majority, the slaves. When word of the French Revolution reached Haiti, a number of Haitian-born revolutionary movements emerged simultaneously. Then when the French revolutionary government granted full French citizenship to free people-of-colour in May 1793, it quickly descend into a three-sided civil war between the Big White, Little Whites, and the free people-of-colour. However, all three groups would be challenged by the enslaved black masses. In August 1791, a massive slave revolt erupted on the island. Amongst the leaders was Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave who had served his master as a coachman and achieved some degree of literacy. L’Ouverture helped mould the slaves into a disciplined army that could withstand attacks from the French troops, and by 1792 they controlled a third of the island. In 1793, the British who were at war with France invaded Haiti, but after a series of defeats against L’Ouverture’s forces, they withdrew five years later. Thereafter, L’Ouverture steadily established himself as the strongest of the various black leaders. By 1801, he had expanded the revolution and conquered the Spanish side of the island (modern-day Dominican Republic). He abolished slavery in the Spanish-speaking colony also, and declared himself Governor-General for life over the entire island. L’Ouverture proved himself an able and flexible administrator, even inviting several former French colonists to return to their plantations, although he strictly ensured that their ex-slaves got to work as free labourers. He also signed trade agreements with powers such as the United States and Britain. L’Ouverture’s good fortune was that the war with Britain made it impossible for France to send out troops to suppress his insurrection. However his luck runs out in 1801, when the two exhausted European enemies agree to the peace. In 1802, General Charles Leclerc was dispatched by his brother-in-law Napoleon Bonaparte to restore both French rule and slavery. L’Ouverture was captured, and sent back to France where he died in prison in 1803. Nevertheless, the Haitian Revolution continued under his lieutenant, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a leader very much more extreme than L’Ouverture. The renewal of war with Britain in 1803, combined with the ravages of yellow fever, led to the defeat of the French forces at the Battle of Vertieres (November 1803). In January 1804, Dessalines declared the nation independent, and massacred those French who still remained on the island. Nevertheless, France became the first nation to recognize its independence. Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the Americas, after the United States, to win its independence from a European power. Independence would not bring peace to Haiti with political instability prevalent into the 20th century; Dessalines himself was killed attempting to put down a revolt in 1806. Britain and Ireland While chaos reigned in France, Britain faced her own financial crisis after the expense of the American War of Independence. However, she also had one of her most talented Prime Ministers in William Pitt the Younger (1783-1806 AD). Pitt would in many ways define the role of the British Prime Minister as the co-ordinator of the various government departments. He set to work on a series of well-judged and effective measures to repair the national finances. He greatly simplifies the tax system, while taking strong measures to end smuggling. He also tried to open up Britain as a free market economy based on the ideas of social philosopher Adam Smith, although his efforts were largely frustrated. However, the heady achievements of the American and French Revolutions would inspire trouble for the British in Ireland. While the Irish Catholics still suffered under the draconian Penal Laws, Ireland’s Protestants too found cause for resentment. Newly arrived English Protestants often secured the best public offices in government and the Irish Protestant Church, and Irish commerce suffered from harmful tariffs with Britain. Under Wolfe Tone, a moderate Protestant, the United Irishmen was established in 1791 aiming for political reform and Catholic emancipation. In response, the Orange Order was formed in 1795 by the hard-line Protestants to resist such Irish nationalism. In 1798, Wolfe Tone persuaded the French to land a small invasion force in Ireland to ignite an uprising against British rule. Although a storm delayed the French landing, his colleagues in Ireland launched the armed rebellion anyway. By the time Wolfe Tone arrived with his French forces, the rebellion in Ireland which had quickly descended into sectarian violence had already been suppressed by the British government and Orange Order. Wolfe Tone was captured and convicted of treason, although he cuts his own throat to cheat the gallows. Instead of an independent Ireland, Pitt established the full union between Ireland and Britain; the Act of Union (1800). The result pleases no one. Pitt had pledged Catholic emancipation in order to win the vote in the Dublin parliament, but then could not deliver it after passionate opposition from King George III. Meanwhile, Ireland’s Protestant political classes were now small fry in the larger British parliament in London. Another consequence was that many estates in Ireland fell into the neglect and decay associated with absentee landlords. Determination to break the Union surfaced almost immediately in the uprising of Robert Emmet in 1803. Although the rebellion itself was a fiasco, Emmet became a nationalist martyr after his epic speech from the dock. Category:Historical Periods